mohdwahidi's photo ideas

Fireworks- literally translated means working with fire. This is what our team in Labuan last night are doing, trying to work with fireworks. Here is one of the best pictures I have taken. Nikon D40. f/22. 10sec. ISO 200.

The challenge to us when shooting this picture is looking for the best place to setup our tripod since there are a crowd over there. We need to find a spot where we can include a place, building or any architecture that can symbolize Labuan in our shot. So, we went to a round about near the Dataran Labuan where a sculpture Marlin fishes was placed. If we didn’t include something that symbolize the place, the fireworks shot would be useless because we can’t determine where the place is. That’s why, we always see KL Tower is included in every fireworks shot every now and then.

The next challenge was for us to determine the aperture needed to include the Marlins and not overexposed it because there were 4 spotlight pointing at them! We can’t use big aperture opening and also we can’t use a very small aperture opening due to the fact that the fireworks light and trails is not much brighter than the spotlight. By experimenting with different aperture, we found that f/16 – f/20 is the best. Using this settings, we can capture the fireworks beautifully and not overexposing the Marlins.

Shutter release is made by a remote. The shutter speed is set to bulb and we control the time of the exposure by looking at the fireworks and readying the remote in our hands, closing the shutter after the fireworks has burst.

No related posts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 12:40 am and is filed under fireworks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.